The Kind of Love That Travels

I’ve lived outside my parent’s house longer than the time I spent living in it.

This gives me a pang of sadness because I had the privilege to grow up in a place I loved surrounded by people I loved how I knew loved me back. Still, I was terrified that my difference, that my gayness, would separate me from the love and security I knew in my sleepy, small Texas town. And honestly, in some ways it did.

I’ve never known Texas to be a place that celebrates, nurtures and protects LGBTQ people and their families thought I know many individuals and small communities who fight for safe spaces for queer Texans. I have experienced hatred coming directly at me and have witness that hatred being nurtured by people and institutions I grew up around. So, I moved away, and I don’t think it’s likely that I will ever live in Texas again.

So, I’m sad when I think that most of my life has been lived outside of my parents’ home. And I’m sick right now. When I’m sick I tend to get melancholy. I’m editing my book for a deadline this week, and there it was. In the pages of my book I found the love I needed, waiting right there.

There is a kind of love that travels, you see. Across states, across borders, across oceans. It’s not bound by time or conditions. It’s a kind of love that’s passed down and that, if you are so lucky, you get to receive from someone far, far away.

In my book I share a story of the first time I was sick in Armenia. There in my host family’s house, in the room they gave to me, I writhed beneath the covers and wished for the kind of care I’d been given as a kind.

I couldn’t feel my mother’s hand on my forehead checking for a temperature. I couldn’t feel the weight of a blanket as she draped it over me or see my parents sitting in the living room while we waited out the illness hours watching some show on TV.

But then I remembered. I remembered a gift my mother gave me, a home remedy. She’d told me of it, the simple act of gargling salt water to sooth my sore throat. She told me, “My mother taught me to do this.” I remembered, and I lifted myself from bed and stepped out of the room.

That love travelled to me without my mother having to do anything on that particular day. In fact, I’d only come out to my parents a few weeks before that, and it hadn’t gone well. But it didn’t matter. The love was able to travel over that chasm, through two generations, over an ocean and so many borders to find me there.

Here is a bit from my book about that night on the front porch of my hostfamily’s home after Geghetsik, an aunt of the family, gave me a glass of warm water, a spoon, a shaker of salt.

I gargled, humming so that the water jostled and splashed in my open mouth. I tried to press my tongue away from my soft pallet so that the water would sink over my tonsils without going down my throat.

I leaned forward, cold wet clothes grazing my shoulder, and I spat over the railing, the water splashing onto the grass below.

I did this again and again. There were no sounds I could hear from this perch on the porch, and there was no view of any other houses. Just the view out into my host family’s cherry tree orchard where the trees appeared as dark silhouettes on the long grass below which shone silvery blueish-white in the moonlight.

I put notes to my humming, and rhythm, and my gargle became a song. Suddenly, with each mouthful of saltwater, I hummed I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing (In Perfect Harmony). The water splashed, and the tiniest droplets sprang over my lips and landed on my cheeks and my chin and the soft skin of my neck. I looked up at the sky full of stars and a nearly full moon.

I thought to myself of my mother and my grandmother and this home remedy they’d passed down to me. Had there been anyone but me on that porch, I would be hurrying through this ritual and remedy, embarrassed of my illness and my strange gargling and spitting. I would not be humming a song.

But there was no one. Just me and cherry trees and a sky full of stars and a remedy as old as time.

And you see, there it is again, the love traveling, even now, to me on this day so many years later.

And even now, it is a remedy.